Shoplifters and Frauds

With just a month left until we make the journey, our minds turn to the sobering prospect of transporting Ella halfway around the world, without a stop over. You've heard of the film Snakes on a Plane - well that's just an adaptation of the novel Toddlers on a Plane, though the censors thought it'd scare the audience so they had to change the theme.

When we came out to Australia we brought a portable DVD player with a three hour battery. We also bought a spare battery for emergencies so when we left Manchester in January we were fully loaded with six hours of artillery as well as the various stickers and other crap we had to carry.

Anyway, the first emergency came when we landed in Sydney and found the DVD screen had cracked somewhere along the journey down from Hong Kong. We tried to claim on the travel insurance but they wanted us to claim on the house insurance and the house insurance was all too complicated.

In the event, we bit our lips and bought a second DVD player. The second DVD player played up a bit; sometimes it wouldn't play at all and we just couldn't work out what the problem was. Apart from that, it was okay, okay until Ella knocked it off the top of the telly and broke it back in July, at which point an un-named friend suggest we take it back to the shop we'd bought it and simply say we couldn't get it to play, which we did. And yes, that's a naughty thing to do but at the same time it was partly true, even before it fell off the telly.

So the shop believed the story and they replaced the machine, only by now the original version had been superceeded by a newer (bigger) model so we got the newer one instead. The problem was, the spare battery for the old machine didn't fit the new one, so we'd need to buy another one before we made the journey back uphill.

The reason I'm telling you all this is because Darren went back to the shop and ordered a battery for the bigger model, but when we went back to collect it this morning it was the wrong battery altogether, so at this moment in time, three hours remains the limit of our defence capabilities. Anyway, in the middle of all the hassle and the exclaiming about the wrong battery, Ella helped herself to a little massage machine and made clean out of the shop with it in her lap. We didn't realise until we got to the car park.

Darren's proud as punch. His daughter not only nicks stuff from shops, she nicks vibrators. I'm maintaining the line that it was a hand held massager.

The shame of it.